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I spent much of yesterday doing something a publisher should never have to do - buying skin for an author in preparation for an book launch. But when this event takes place in the virtual world of Second Life and when the author is William Gibson, normal publishing activity leaps out of the window.

The author of Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition and the just released Spook Country has legions of fans in Second Life and four hours before the event they had began to gather to await his arrival. Indeed so many arrived early that William Gibson himself could not get into the sim (the virtual space where the event was taking place) leading to a brief evacuation to allow the author to sneak in through the virtual fire escape. And then we were reminded that Second Life is still very much a world in its infancy by a video which failed to play - hopefully not too many were disappointed by seeing the quicktime logo for a few minutes!

But when William Gibson took to the stage, descending from the heavens in a customized shipping container, everything came good. He read from the opening portion of Spook Country and answered a series of very fine questions from the audience who hung onto his every word. Audio was beamed in from the MDM campus in Vancouver to the riversrunred studios in London, and out to Second Life. What made me happy about this event was that it gave people from all over the world a chance to be in the same space as one of their favourite authors, and during the event I was receiving goodwill messages from people thrilled to see him.

Should he return to Second Life he will find lots of friends, old and new, and I guess that this is what virtual worlds and social marketing is really all about.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

PS Pics, audio and video from the event will be available very soon and there is a nice piece about it here.

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A most pleasant lunch yesterday, with Jeremy Ettinghausen (super power: Digital Publisher and Introducer of Punctuality into people's lives) and new personal hero (and Penguin author) Naomi Alderman. We found out heaps of top notch gossip about Perplex City from lead writer Naomi, which pretty much blew my mind, even though most of it was just hints along the lines of "Yes, Cube 2/3 does mean something exciting." Bloody hell. Since one of her super-powers is also Buffy, we bored Ettinghausen with some catch-up, but our main conversation was about ARGs.

For those of you who are unaware of ARGs, or perhaps just of what ARG means, here's a quick guide. Basically, if you've stumbled across some odd Dharma Initiative stuff while googling Lost, you've found an Alternate Reality Game. Unfortunately, one of the major problems of the ARG is that if you use it to promote something, the game itself can often be more popular that the product itself (witness A.I. vs The Beast) - which is fine if you care only about great gameplay, not so great if you want everyone to see your film/read your book/watch your programme.

The question I kept nagging Naomi with (until I had a horrible feeling she was about to put her head down on the table and start weeping) was this: How do you get people to care about your mysteries? Obviously, it helps not to do something rubbish. And it also helps if whatever you're basing it on has the rough shape of an ARG anyway (a particularly beautiful example here). But it seems the key is building communities: feeding information and challenging them to get involved, whether it's a black helicopter pick-up, or a fiendish puzzle.

So that is what the finest minds of Penguin will be attaching their skulls to. Over the next few months, we'll be attempting to schmooze with those great originators, and will hopefully bring you, Dear Reader, the fruits of our labour.

Sam the Junior Copywriter

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Thanks to Darlene Fichter for pointing out* this really excellent video from the Aarhus Public Library in Denmark. "When everything is available online, why come to the library at all?" The video attempts to answer this.

It is in English and reports on a project they called The Transformation Lab that included the Literature Lab, the Music Lab (which included an Inspiration Zone), the News Lab, The Square, and the Exhibition Lab.

They present five lessons learned (and shown):
- flexible spaces are necessary
- open events are a good idea and well received
- the physical library needs to be augmented with interactive technology
- networking is critical among users, IT specialists, library staff, architects etc
- users need to have a more visible role inside the library

Simple techniques produced the greatest impact...the users like to become involved "as long as it was not too much trouble and providing it brings about an instant result."

The narrator comments that users have been forced to dismiss the book as library brand (makes me wonder if they've read The Perceptions report) and that they are co-creators of a new library space.

And reading the credits, I see the project was supported by the Danish National Library and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So, are libraries in North America making grant applications for such projects?


*Darlene has other good videos noted at "Blog on the Side".

So to make a long story short, some guy was getting weird phone calls from people who thought he owned a particular piece of derelict property in Lower Manhattan. He didn't own the building and was pretty annoyed at the calls; all he could figure was that someone had posted his phone number on the building, and that's why people were bugging him. But he couldn't get into Manhattan to check.

So he posted a request on Metafilter, asking if someone could swing by the building and check for him.

And someone did!

For those not familiar with Metafilter, it's a website where anyone can post a question--on anything--and anyone can answer the question. "Querying the hive mind," is the site's tag-line. For every question, there's someone out there with an answer, and Metafilter aims to bring the two together.

Now, this is what I love about the internet--yeah, sure there may be some pretty weird people lurking about the edges, trolls, and what-have-you, and you can get mired into a lot of trouble, should you not be careful. But on the other hand, it allows people to connect in ways never before possible. And I think that's pretty cool.

Daffy futurism is always with us. It's been telling us that bookstores would be replaced by print-on-demand kiosks that could spit out a freshly produced and bound version of any book every published. Hasn't happened yet.

It's been predicting that books would be replaced by gadgets like the Sony e-book reader, allowing us to take hundreds of books in a package the size of a slender paperback. Hasn't happened yet. Although to be fair, E-ink is a legitimately intriguing technology, and will see useful application very soon.

But most of the discourse about technology and books circles around the idea of replacing books. I think the future is going to be more interesting than that. I think technology will enhance the book-as-artifact.

Genre literature is full of representations of books that transcend the static nature of dead ink on paper. In movies, both the Harry Potter movies and Minority Report featured newspapers with animated pictures. Much more interesting was Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, where Greenaway used animation, the then brand-new technology of HDTV, and other tricks to bring alive the fact that magic books were, well, magic, and could do things normal books never would -- drip tar, show the heavens in motion, unfurl graceful swinging pendulums, or provide a traveling home for insects.

Despite Clarke's Third Law, technology isn't going to give us books that cool anytime soon. But consider pop-up books. There is a long history of movable books, and some of them are pretty f'ing impressive. But, as they say, that's old tech. It's just paper. But take this pop-up book, that incorporates LED lights to create a working pop-up street lamp. Now that's cool.

And -- on the technology side at least -- things have the possibility to get much cooler. Given advances in projector miniaturization -- they're planning to put them in cellphones -- one could easily build a pop-up book that unfolded a screen, a small working projector, and enough flash memory to hold sub-vga versions of a dozen movies. You could even put in pop-up cars and make it a drive-in. Think of a gorgeous coffee table book about 30's horror movies that incorporated that as its central feature -- who wouldn't want that in their living room?

Of course it's not just pop-ups. Think of a fantasy novel with an integrated display and a motion sensor. As you physically panned the book across the room, it would show you a moving view of the world, as if you were looking through a tiny window shifting across a vast landscape. Or a book on robots that sprouted legs and walked towards you if you called it. An epistolatory novel where a new letter emerged from the next blank page each night.

Will any of this happen? Who knows. But it's all possible -- possible right now.

Let me offer a very loose metaphor for the future of books: the watch industry. When digital watches hit, they could tell time -- the functional purpose of a watch -- far better than any mechanical watch ever could. Yet people still pay stupendous sums for mechanical watches, because they believe in the craftsmanship involved, in the metaphor that intricate watches provide for man's mastery over time. They're not bought for function. They're bought because they are beautiful, and because they represent something.

Eventually, technology will supplant the purely functional nature of books. But maybe, just maybe, the essence of books -- what makes us love them -- the imagination and the discovery and the joy of touching smooth paper and sturdy binding -- will be refracted through technology to create something new.

Noted in the World Future Society's e-newsletter Futurist Update, April 2007 (links and emphasis added):

"On his Web site FutureCheck, Dutch futurist Marcel Bullinga offers a tantalizing glimpse of Europe in the year 2020--a society boosted by the transparent, intelligent, virtual world. This video is an abridged version of what Bullinga shows during his live presentations."

The 1:35 video is on the FutureCheck site and Youtube here.

Well, we are like Scheherazade in that we've told 1,001 stories here at It's All Good since our first post on May 20, 2004. Although, as far as I know, none of us will be executed if we stop telling stories--but I could be wrong.

It's fitting that our newest IAGer, Chrystie, made the 1,001 post.

If we posted all the stories we come across, we would be way way over this number--Alice and I seem to exchange at least two emails a week bemoaning the number of items we would like to blog about and don't find the time to, amidst all the other things we have to do.

So, perhaps a brain scan that can read my intentions and then make words based on what I planned to blog about will help get more things out of my head and into IAG.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, and University College London and Oxford University in England, have apparently developed a technique for doing at least the first part of this--looking inside peoples' brains and reading their intentions before they act, according to this article published in The Guardian Online today.

Very "future-y" and Minority Reportish. Maybe public libraries that charge fines for overdue materials can recoup money earlier in the process--say, before the material is even borrowed--by scanning the brains of borrowers and fining those who clearly have the intention of returning stuff late.

Happy Friday.

So a couple of months ago I mentioned in this post a secret project, and now launch day is finally here! Penguin is launching its first wiki and in a project called A Million Penguins we've created a space where anyone can contribute to the writing of a novel and anyone can edit anyone else's writing.

Over the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel. We honestly don't know how this is going to turn out - it's an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while others - the writing of a novel, for example - have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation. But with collaboration, crowdsourcing and the 'wisdom of the crowds' being buzz words du jour, we thought we might as well see if these new trends can be applied to a less obvious sphere than, say, software development.

So we've got a team of MA students in to kick things off and seed a community, a Penguin editor is on hand to write regular reading reports on the novel in progress (which we will publish here) and now all we're waiting for is you, dear readers, to fire up those creative juices, leave your egos at the door and get stuck in.

Can a community write a novel? Let's find out.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

If you want to find out what Penguin will be up to in 2007 check out this episode of the Penguin Podcast featuring an interview with Tom Weldon, Managing Director of Penguin's General Division which publishes everything from Jeremy Clarkson to Zadie Smith with a dash of Jamie Oliver and a sprinkling of history and romance thrown in. Tom tells us what are the new writers are going to be hot this year and shares his views on that most contentious of subjects, the celebrity autobiography.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher